Tuesday, May 27, 2014

May 27

25-year-old openly-gay Montreal film maker Xavier Dolan (b. 1989), who
has somehow managed to write and direct five well-received movies in as
many years, won the Jury Prize at the Cannes* Film Festival for Mommy last weekend. Mommy
tells the story of a single mother raising a violent and troubled
teenage son. They receive unexpected help and friendship from their shy
neighbor, a female schoolteacher on sabbatical who suffers from a
crippling stutter.

*I have never before heard so many media folk mispronounce this city name as last weekend during the festival. It's close to "can" (as in a can of soup), tending toward "Ken," and there's a soft and subtle "nuh" at the end. KEN-uh. Sort of.Best just to go there and listen to the natives. Trust me.

The Québécois director, writer and actor Dolan said in his acceptance speech:

“The
emotion that I feel in contemplating this mythic room is overwhelming.
I’m overwhelmed with gratitude, standing before this jury. I’ve received
so much love over the last week. We do this work to love and be loved,
as revenge for our imaginary loves...People are entitled to their own
tastes, and some will dislike what you do; some will dislike who you
are. But together we can change the world. By touching people, making
they laugh and cry, we can change minds and lives. Not only politicians
but artists can change it. There are no limits to our ambition.
Everything is possible for those who dream, dare, work and never give
up.”

Canadian Xavier, who speaks flawless, unaccented English,
has nevertheless worked exclusively within the genre of French-language
cinema. He has been compared to Woody Allen (only younger, cuter and
gay!), because both make character-driven films about relationships, and
both act in their own movies. At age twenty (!), Dolan electrified the
film world with I Killed My Mother (J'ai tué ma mère
– 2009), a semi-autobiographical movie that he wrote, directed and
starred in. The winner of dozens of awards, that film was about a young
homosexual at odds with his mother.

Dolan’s Tom at the Farm (Tom à la ferme
– 2013) dealt with a young gay man’s encounter with the family of his
recently deceased lover; the parents were not aware that their son was
gay, nor were they aware of Tom’s relationship with their son. Heartbeats (Les amours imaginaires – 2010) explored a love triangle in which a man and a woman have a relationship with the same man. Laurence Anyways (2012) chronicles a ten year span of a male-to-female transsexual's relationship with her female lover.

Xavier
Dolan, who tops out at 5' 6½", celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday
just two months ago. Trivia: the Quebec-specific French-language dubbed
version of the animated series South Park features Dolan as the voice of Stan.